Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

Conservatives struggle with a fundamental problem: our ideals are perennially unpopular, at least until things get so bad that people are desperate enough for a solution that they turn to matured wisdom.

As long as the proles — the 90% of any society who belong to the category of people who need to be told what to do — have fat enough paychecks, beer, bread and circuses, they are perfectly content to ignore any long term problems. In fact, they delight in not just ignoring them but shaming anyone who notices them as a “loser,” because this makes them feel more powerful.

With the fall of Berlin, conservatism was not just marginalized by its relative unpopularity, but actively under assault for any area where its ideas overlapped with those of the National Socialists. This caused the “winners” to immediately drop those ideas, and the “losers” to hang on to them, perhaps with the disclaimer that they could be implemented differently.

Only fifteen years after the end of the second world war, America and Europe were already swinging hard to the Left, mainly because post-war prosperity guaranteed that people would be entirely unconcerned about any long-term consequences. As the saying goes, while there’s food, the peasants party, and then only worry about what to do when they wake up the next day to find themselves hungry.

Since that triumph of the Left, conservatives who speak honestly and realistically have been essentially a persecuted minority, with those who speak taboo truths finding themselves facing the terror of public opinion which seeks to deprive them of jobs, housing, friends and family:

“The thought of getting outed as ‘white supremacists’ to our employers and possibly losing our jobs is a horrifying prospect,” the user Ignatz wrote. If forced to choose between a rally, which could bring him unwanted exposure, or supporting his white family, he says he would choose the latter.

…”But, by and large, people are scared because of the exact same reasons you’d expect,” says Hankes. “It’s hard to get a job, hard to make a living, hard to have a normal social life when all your friends and family know you believe in ethnic cleansing.”

This means that we are living in a soft totalitarian state. Like regular garden-variety totalitarianism, soft totalitarian controls people by regulating what methods and ideas they can be exposed to. However, soft totalitarianism adds a wrinkle: We The People, in our endless quest for social acceptance, do the enforcing instead of government.

That extends to corporations and others who achieve their success and wealth through being popular. Consumerism, as it turns out, is a form of democracy; whatever the largest group of people purchases, wins, and so a market or competition is set up in which companies compete to be the most popular. Inevitably, that spills outward from value and quality of their products to public image, which then swings Leftward as all things do when left up to a mass of people, mainly because that mass chooses the lowest common denominator, which is always simple social sentiments instead of complex critical thinking.

In a soft totalitarian state, government uses freedom as a weapon, knowing that most people are short-term thinkers and therefore both selfish and oblivious to long-term consequences, and that in groups, people always choose a mediocre option in order to keep the group together because only a few people understand the task and have a sensible take on it, anyway. The more freedom and fewer restrictions, the more emboldened the mob becomes to engage in bad behavior, and as a result, the more it fears anyone who wants actual standards, morals, customs, values, culture, heritage, religion or purpose. The mob is the weapon.

In any democratic state, the mob takes over because it creates a market for liars. These actors go on stage, make promises they know are untrue, collect votes and then drive out anyone else. Like the Chicago “political machines” of the 19th century, they then rig the system so no one else can win. As Plato noted, they invariably import foreigners who, as people alienated from the majority, always vote for strong protectors, and so keep the actors in charge.

Their problem is that, as conductors of the masses, they must find a way to motivate an increasingly selfish and sluggish group of very distracted people, most of whom are lost in solipsistic ego-drama and attention whoring, in order to stay in power. To do this they must create vivid images like we would find in comic books of exaggerated good versus evil, with the underdog always winning because most people see themselves as an underdog, if for nothing else to justify their selfish behavior and excuse their failings, claiming oppression and therefore a “right” to take what they secretly believe is theirs, or to simply not contribute much. Politics becomes a hybrid between a circus and a football game, with constant distractions to keep the crowd interested, and then narrow characterizations to channel them into one opinion or another. This is one of the many reasons that democracy is immoral and dishonest.

Many have misunderstood this characteristic of democracy. They see how democracy acts against white people, men, Christians and intelligent people, and assume that it has singled these out for some purpose of its own. In a realistic assessment, what it is doing is forming a pretext. Democracy is the political system of equality; equality is only valuable to those who need it, which are the ones who could not succeed without it. If there are one hundred students in a class and a test comes back where grades are worse than usual, it is not the kids with As who are claiming the test was not fair. Equality creates an inherent victim narrative where those who are not successful claim to be equal, which means that the only reason they are not doing as well as the successful is that they have been victimized, oppressed or discriminated against by some force… and there is no one to blame except those who are successful. This is why all equality movements consist of taking from the successful and giving to the less successful. The war against successful groups — including white people in lands founded by white people — is a pretext for the seizure of wealth and power, followed by redistribution of the same.

You might wonder, why does this equality of power not threaten those in power? The answer is that equality is entropy. If everyone literally has the same amount of power, nothing will get done; this is why all known anarchist communes have perished, even those below Dunbar’s number, the mythical amount of people that one can personally know which allows — in theory — any political system to work. As a result, the equal crowd will always turn to a leader or protector, and who better to do this than the person who just gifted them with wealth and power taken from those who succeeded more than the herd? This creates a cycle where politicians gain power by stealing, then give it to the people, who give it back in exchange for more, and so taxes always go up, more rules are created so there can be more fines, more fees are charged to those with more wealth, and educational systems are designed to bore the intelligent and delight the idiotic.

Soft totalitarianism consists of this cycle. In the circus part of the cycle, the politicians provoke outrage in the herd about some target that can be easily destroyed. The mob, which like all groups with no individual power and full anonymity, loves to destroy, and this whets its excitement like a guillotine or race riot. Then comes the football game part of the cycle, where the crowd is encouraged to view itself as intelligent and morally upstanding for supporting blue team over red team. Finally, the politicians deliver the flashpoint: the other team victimized us, and thus we are justified in destroying them. By any means necessary. They are against our values. They threaten us. They must be destr– errr, defeated, wink wink.

We are now caught in that cycle. The Left whipped up the circus by calling the Alt Right “racists,” and there has been no greater sin according to American herd politics since 1945, so people were ready for violence. The cops created the football game by encouraging violence. Then, after one potentially mentally unstable person panicked and in trying to escape, crashed into another car which then killed one person and injured nineteen, the herd was told that it was the victim. There was the dog whistle! The crowd rushed off to smash the bad team, and the corporations, desperate for attention because it is the only thing keeping them relevant in an anarchic society with no values, used that as a pretext to wage war against the Alt Right.

At this point, we see a fundamental problem with the internet: once entirely owned by the government, it now is mostly in the hands of private businesses, and they are prone to do whatever reduces the number of complaints coming in while also giving them headlines that appease the Left, because the Left are the primarily media consumers and especially of social media, where they are most active in both finding news and regular use:

Overall, consistent conservatives are somewhat less likely than consistent liberals to get government and political news on Facebook or Twitter, primarily because they are somewhat less likely to use the sites in the first place. About half (49%) of consistent liberals (and a similar share of those with mixed ideological views) say they got news about government and politics in the past week from Facebook, compared with 40% of consistent conservatives. And while 13% of consistent liberals say they got political news on Twitter in the past week, just 5% of consistent conservatives (and 8% of groups in between) say the same.

Rather than expand to an audience which is less interested in spending its time clicking around, perhaps because it has more important things to do, the media is doubling down on its existing audience, mainly because the fortunes of the dot-com boom are fading and since statistics count warm bodies, it is essential to these companies to get as many warm bodies in the door as possible.

This means that private companies are in control of public spaces where these private companies derive benefit from making “safe spaces,” which means removing all non-Left-wing content. That realization prompted calls to regulate social media as a public utility:

Bannon’s basic argument, as he has outlined it to people who’ve spoken with him, is that Facebook and Google have become effectively a necessity in contemporary life. Indeed, there may be something about an online social network or a search engine that lends itself to becoming a natural monopoly, much like a cable company, a water and sewer system, or a railroad. The sources recounted the conversations on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to give the accounts on record, and could face repercussions for doing so.

…Under the Obama administration, the Federal Communications Commission moved forward on a plan to regulate internet service providers as utilities, barring them from slowing down traffic to a site in order to pressure it into paying higher fees. The Trump administration is pushing to reverse that move, which complicates Bannon’s message.

…Silicon Valley’s liberal cultural politics puts it at odds occasionally with more conservative, rural Trump voters. Facebook was confronted by a backlash over its news curating during last year’s presidential campaign. With insiders claiming there was an anti-conservative bias, Facebook pulled its live team off the project.

If you can imagine a town where the only public spaces — churches, pubs, parks, streetcorners and any other place where more than a handful of people could gather — were owned by a company that forbade discussion of certain topics, you can see the risk in allowing private companies to control what has become a public space that has displaced other means of mass communication. This causes concern for the removal of free speech through methods that soft totalitarianism pioneered:

This brings me to the heart of my argument, today free speech no longer hinges on the government telling people it cannot say certain words. Earlier this year the Supreme Court affirmed that “hate speech” that bogeyman of inferior minds is protected speech. Rather, what’s happened is that the concept of “corporate social responsibility” a buzzword for social justice taught in business schools across the US, has been used to deplatform and deny the right the opportunity to participate in the arena of ideas simply because they control the medium, or media, through which the message must travel.

Technology has put the spirit of the First Amendment in a difficult position. Pedants all over the internet will tell you that censorship is only censorship when the government does it, private companies can censor all they want. They can refuse to do business with an individual.

Totalitarianism is a government banning ideas and behaviors; soft totalitarianism is a raging mob that destroys anything which disagrees with the idea of the mob itself, which is that everyone is accepted and wealth and power should be redistributed to them. This is what mobs have always wanted, an excuse to destroy and loot, and resembles a slow-motion riot more than intelligent political change. With social media, soft totalitarianism has found its ultimate weapon.

For the Right to survive this, it will need to create its own internet from the ground-up based on explicit principles of freedom of speech. A good start would be decentralizing, or abandoning centralized sites like Facebook and Google, to instead user a smaller network of blogs, news sites, search engines and chat rooms that are too numerous and too unknown to become targets. Eventually, the wires and servers themselves could be furnished, presenting a space of actual net neutrality not just in its mechanics but in its refusal to allow any host to prioritize traffic from any other, because that would in itself be a form of proto-censorship of this public-private space.

We are living in a soft totalitarian state. As Plato wrote, democracy always collapses this way and leaves behind tyranny. People are loathe to realize that what most of us want, in any group, is usually wrong, mainly because a mob has no accountability and people act through social behavior instead of logical thinking. If humanity is to survive into the next century, it is essential that we come to awareness that the crowd is evil and our only salvation lies in creating a hierarchy where the smartest, not the mob, are on top.

Someone ran over some Muslims in England yesterday. The Muslims, sensitive to optics and public relations moments, quickly made a big show of being peaceful despite having been attacked in front of a mosque known for its extremist sentiments. They know the voters are stupid and plan to take them for the fools they are and use them as useful idiots in their war against non-Muslim civilization.

In the meantime, the circus ringmasters of the useful idiot herd started up with the sentimental and strong statements designed to pacify the sheep for another good fleecing in the next election. That included applying anesthesia in the form of action to conceal the problem, so that the voters can go back to sleep in the blaze of glory that is themselves:

It was the latest in a series of statements from Ms May that suggest she believes recent attacks have strengthened the case for her widely-criticised plans to regulate the online world.

Those plans include launching a massive crackdown on internet security so messages on apps such as WhatsApp can be accessed more easily by authorities, and censorship of what can be published online.

England has experienced three Muslim terrorist attacks in a row and one white guy hitting a few people with a van. This shows that whatever the UK is doing is not working, but admitting that requires the voters to admit they were wrong, which means they were manipulated, which means they have lost. So what will they do?

Like all primates, they will double down. To reverse course is to admit error, and especially at the lower end of the IQ curve, people hate to do that. Instead of looking at the issue of terrorism and diversity, which really is a single issue when you think about it, they will focus on the best way to sprinkle gold dust on the disaster and proclaim themselves strong, independent voters who don’t need no logic.

Use “more engineering resources to apply our most advanced machine learning research to train new ‘content classifiers’ to help us more quickly identify and remove such content.”

Expand YouTube’s Trusted Flagger program by adding 50 independent, “expert” non-governmental organizations to the 63 groups already part of it. Google will offer grants to fund the groups.

Take a “tougher stance on videos that do not clearly violate our policies — for example, videos that contain inflammatory religious or supremacist content.” Such videos will “appear behind a warning” and will not be “monetized, recommended or eligible for comments or user endorsements.”

Expand YouTube’s efforts in counter-radicalization. “We are working with Jigsaw to implement the ‘redirect method’ more broadly across Europe. This promising approach harnesses the power of targeted online advertising to reach potential Isis recruits, and redirects them towards anti-terrorist videos that can change their minds about joining.” A Google spokeswoman said Jigsaw’s “redirect method” is already in use in the US.

Google, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit have all stepped up their censorship policies of late. They claim they intend to crack down on terrorism, and maybe they will. But as the bolded words above indicate, their real target is to crack down on any Right-wing speech by declaring that it is supremacist, extremist or otherwise anti-social. They have been doing this for years.

This enables the EU to cover up how badly its policies are failing. The voters really just want to go back to sleep, and if they stop seeing alarming messages, they will bed down in the paddock for a good rest before another day of grazing and dodging sheepdogs. But the broader concern is that speech laws are being taken into the realm of health and safety laws, where they are invisible.

On the other hand, in American the Supreme Court took a strong stand for freedom of speech, mainly because it can since the real censorship these days is being done in de facto public spaces like social media that are nonetheless owned by private parties, thus not regulated by the First Amendment:

In his opinion on the case, Justice Samuel Alito wrote, “Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.'”

Justice Anthony Kennedy, in a separate opinion, echoed Alito’s sentiments. “A law found to discriminate based on viewpoint is an “egregious form of content discrimination,” which is “presumptively unconstitutional,'” Kennedy wrote, continuing to say, “A law that can be directed against speech found offensive to some portion of the public can be turned against minority and dissenting views to the detriment of all.”

“The First Amendment does not entrust that power to the government’s benevolence. Instead, our reliance must be on the substantial safeguards of free and open discussion in a democratic society,” he concluded.

The best decisions are those which change nothing but grab headlines, and the Supreme Court has done that. The United States has strengthened free speech in public, perhaps, but not necessarily on private college campuses or private services like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Netflix and Skype.

EU governments are experts at the shakedown. All they need is one law that says they can suspend, fine, or stop your service and the entire market of the EU is shut down to your company. Using this tool, they will invisibly force these companies to censor content, so that while technically we have free speech, in the places where people talk, nothing of the sort will exist.

Many elements of Taplin’s case are familiar. Newspaper ad revenue has declined by roughly $40 billion between 2000 and 2014, recorded music revenue has dropped $10 billion in the same period, and over 5,000 independent book and record stores have closed in the last two decades. Facebook’s covert experiments in manipulating the emotions of hundreds of thousands of users, Amazon’s atrocious treatment of workers at its distribution centers and Google’s cavalier disregard for copyright laws are also well-documented.

Taplin, director emeritus of the University of Southern California Annenberg Innovation Lab, argues that the major tech companies are fundamentally monopolistic and parasitic — they exploit positions of market dominance to ignore legal regulations, extract inflated prices from advertisers and rely on content produced by others, often without their consent or knowledge.

…Because Amazon can deny publishers access to its enormous customer base, it can force them to accept artificially deflated prices. Google and Facebook can do something similar with advertisers by threatening to deny them access to billions of users. Taplin cites the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, a widely used measure of market concentration in antitrust law that allows regulators to determine whether markets are becoming monopolistic. A score of 2,500 is considered highly concentrated. The HHI for internet search markets is 7,402.

Industries which behave in this way are ones near the peak of their life cycle. They have grown too far and become too big to manage themselves, and now they need more money just to survive. Instead of admitting that its product was search and advertising, and downsize to fit that need alone, Google expanded to conquer nearby industries and now is a towering behemoth that must constantly expand to feed its own bulk.

As a result, its profit is no longer based on delivery of product alone; it manipulates its own product to make it more profitable, without offering a competitive advantage. This self-cannibalization is leading to the implosion of all internet media, since they have outpaced what the market can offer and now are treating consumers like piggy banks:

The decline of the establishment industries has led to the increased quality of the alternative industries; but the alternative media has been relying upon advertising dollars, and it’s the establishment media which pays for advertising. The establishment industries have effectively been paying to destroy their consumer base. Furthermore, the technology itself undermines advertising. Why pay for a $6 million advertising campaign, when for a few hundred dollars you can advertise on Tom Leykis, and the algorithm will do the rest?

So, the companies which sell algorithmic content – Twitter, YouTube, Google, Amazon, and Facebook – are undermining the establishment industries whose advertising campaigns are bankrolling their algorithms. Thus, to maintain profitability, they need to destroy the very algorithms they offer. They’re currently subsisting off of their First-Mover Advantage, but that’s a foundation which is quickly eroding away.

This means that the industry as a whole is overvalued, and the market will have to correct for this value, which means huge losses inbound. Like all other industries based on consumerism itself, or popularity instead of function, this one too will face the knife, and leave in its place a gaping void where functional business used to be.

People are suckers for a revolution. If a revolution happens, in their minds it means that everything that went before was bad which by the converse principle, implies that everything “the people” were doing was good; the people were simply victims of the bad. It explains away their failures and omissions, and gives them license to seize whatever they could not have before.

And to think, people once doubted that we had origins among ancestors of the apes. We are just monkeys underneath the clothes, vocabulary, technology, social pretense and fancy theories. Monkeys are forgivable because they at least do not erect layers of deception around their raw self-interest and essentially venal, opportunistic mentality. Humans just bury it in justifications and rules.

Silicon Valley — this term can be used broadly to represent the technology revolution, especially its post-internet variety — promised a revolution. Old business was manipulative and inefficient, so they would do it better, they promised. And yet, twenty-five years into the process, we are seeing not better but slight improvement coupled with a more powerful version of the bad bosses of decades ago.

The DoL has accused Google of systematically underpaying women, and the court battle centers on the company’s refusal to hand over salary data the government has requested.

The motion for a dismissal – which a judge rejected, in part citing the first amendment – sheds light on Google’s aggressive efforts to end the case at a time when the tech industry is facing increasing criticisms over sexist workplace cultures, gender discrimination and widespread pay disparities. Critics said it appeared that Google was attempting to limit media scrutiny with unusual tactics that raise free press concerns and seem to contradict the corporation’s public claims that it is committed to transparency and accountability in its efforts to promote equal pay.

Google also attempted to restrict press access during a hearing last month. Following a private meeting with the judge about the Guardian’s reporting, Google’s attorney requested that the proceeding be closed to the media before continuing, but a DoL attorney objected and the judge sided with the government.

Not very promising, but probably nothing in comparison to Google’s position as editor and censor of what people see, hear and believe. Most internet searches — some say up to 90% worldwide — are run through Google.

They trademarked the name “Weev”, which I have been using since I was 10 years old, built a social video app, and dozens of celebrities were given money and shares in the company in exchange for using the app.

…I would delay every troll operation I wanted to do until they were spending serious money and resources to try to dig themselves out of a pagerank hole. Whenever they would drop deep into the second page of Google results (where they might as well not even exist) they would try to do another press push and garner backlinks.

…In 2016, after three years of an entire team of people working fulltime, a few million dollars in funding wasted, dozens of physical events they threw in meatspace, and repeated humiliation at the hands of a single neo-Nazi blogger, the Weev app closed up shop forever.

This is what one man — albeit a creative and knowledgeable one — can do with an internet connection and a few thousand dollars. But what about Google, who can simply alter an algorithm, which is not made public, and drop whole sites from the internet? Or appoint a proxy like Wikipedia, who censors any right-wing information and crowds the top five search results on many topics?

If anyone else were doing it, we would recognize this as censorship by monopoly.

This leads to the question of what Google might be censoring. We know the company leans Left because their Google doodles tend to celebrate minor Left-wing figures in preference to major Right-wing ones, and the company’s public statements suggest a social justice mentality pervades the organization.

The former Chairman and CEO of Fox News, Roger Ailes, has passed. He was arguably one of the most consequential individuals in media and politics in the last century, and he leaves behind a loving wife and son. He also leaves behind a cadre of loyal former employees who love and respect him.

But if you run a Google search on him, you’ll find that the top results consist almost entirely of articles from several liberal publications savaging his reputation as a person. The search results — both on mobile and desktop platforms — begin with entries that are strikingly cruel and meanspirited — and raise new questions about Google’s objectivity.

Why do companies lean Left? Right now, the Left is the dominant ideology; for the last century, the West has moved further and further Left to the point where a moderate view of fifty years ago would be considered “far right” now. The goalposts have moved, the Overton window shifted, and the Left has used this to marginalize conservative viewpoints.

It seems Google is doing the same thing. Not only that, but European governments are putting pressure on Google and other social media — Google’s PageRank rewards the popularity of links, not their content, so might be seen as early social media — to remove “hate speech” and other non-Leftist facts and opinions.

Facebook is at least at the moment not able to assure users that their brain activity will not be appropriated to sell ads. This is of course not an indication that the company will do this, only that they are not prepared to rule it out. And to be sure, this is still a hypothetical — it’s possible the company’s neural keyboard will remain somewhere between vaporware and marketing stunt, as has been the case with its solar-powered flying internet relay, or Amazon’s national delivery drone fleet.

A handful of sites control most of the traffic on the web, and their tendency is to be good Leftists and censor or at least bury opposing sources. At the same time, they are expanding to take over even more of our daily lives, putting us at the mercy of them and their ideological overlords.

On top of that, these technologies already work as digital bullies that enforce conformity and lower self-esteem among the young and probably, the rest of us:

Four of the five most popular forms of social media harm young people’s mental health, with Instagram the most damaging, according to research by two health organisations.

…The survey, published on Friday, concluded that Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter are also harmful. Among the five only YouTube was judged to have a positive impact.

The four platforms have a negative effect because they can exacerbate children’s and young people’s body image worries, and worsen bullying, sleep problems and feelings of anxiety, depression and loneliness, the participants said.

Despite being billed as the great liberator of human thought, under the crushing weight of trends and what most people seem to prefer it to be, it has been converted into a new form of the Old Media, just as controlling of our minds and controlled by Leftist dogma, and it plans only to expand further until it crowds out everything else, achieving consensus through propaganda.

The Left specializes in creating mental spam. Every few weeks, there is a new distraction that they hype into an end-of-the-world style issue, not so much because they care about the issue, but because they need to keep their base panicked and angry so that they become a personal army to crush opposition and demand Leftist power.

Federal regulators will move to roll back one of the Obama administration’s signature Internet policies this week, launching a process to repeal the government’s net neutrality rules that currently regulate how Internet providers may treat websites and their own customers. The vote on Thursday, led by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, will kick off consideration of a proposal to relax regulations on companies such as Comcast and AT&T. If approved by the 2-1 Republican-majority commission, it will be a significant step for the broadband industry as it seeks more leeway under government rules to develop new business models. For consumer advocates and tech companies, it will be a setback; those groups argue that looser regulations won’t prevent those business models from harming Internet users and website owners. The current rules force Internet providers to behave much like their cousins in the legacy telephone business. Under the FCC’s net neutrality policy, providers cannot block or slow down consumers’ Internet traffic, or charge websites a fee in order to be displayed on consumers’ screens.

As usual, the Left wants to confuse one method of addressing a problem with the set of all methods, so that their voters think there is only one way to fix the problem and any deviation from that is treason.

First, we should talk about net neutrality. The original idea of the net was that every node could forward packages to every other node, based on the idea of mutuality, or that each did the same to others. This works in a subsidized or military system, but not in a market, where some sites are massively larger than others. This means that the little guys spend their money and energy supporting Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, Apple, Facebook and Twitter, while the big companies owe them nothing.

This means that net neutrality, as a concept, was dead the minute that the internet was commercialized.

Next, we should talk about monopoly. When a large search engine like Google, or massive site like Amazon or Wikipedia, controls most of the eyeballs, the policies this site uses to list links on its pages regulate who lives and who dies. A site with low Google rank disappears and its business evaporates; a concept that Wikipedia refuses to mention — in a model like that of the mainstream media, excluding its ideological enemies — just drops out of public consciousness. Any concept of neutrality is long dead.

With those in mind, we can turn to a solution. Regulation adds expense and litigation to otherwise thriving industries, displacing little guys and favoring big guys. The consumers ultimately want the ability to see anything they want on the net without consideration of what it is. But they have already lost that, long ago.

Instead, it makes sense to let the market cure this one. If an ISP is blocking your traffic, you can sign up with a competing ISP… except you cannot, because regulation keeps the market small and so you have few options. Instead of piling more bad regulations on top of that, it is time to repeal more laws and let the problem work itself out.

If consumers desire net neutrality as much as they claim they do, they will be willing to put market pressure on their ISPs instead of relying on Big Daddy Government to do it for them.

Watching negative contributors burn provides the only realistic pleasure in a time when most things are corrupt. As noted here before, Dot-Com 3.0 is going bust because its advertising model prioritizes true believers who use the net a lot but are not large financial contributors to the economy, thus its advertising is declining in value.

Twitter was last week hit by a report from professors at the University of Southern California and the University of Indiana that estimated that as many as 15% of the social media site’s 319m users were not human. That is nearly twice the company’s own estimate that up to 8.5% of its accounts are managed by “bots”.

The charge is particularly damaging for Twitter because it is already struggling to convince advertisers to return to its platform.

As illusions fall, a void is created into which new(er) media rushes, in particular the voices of individuals. The net may be overcoming the centralized caused by social media, which has not delivered the content or community that people desire. In particular, few trust their dot-com overlords to be anything but conniving, manipulative little Utopians hell-bent on control.

Social media, in response to flagging sales, went after the True Believers who tend to be employed in dead-end positions where they have a lot of time to waste on social media and therefore, represent the bulk of the traffic, despite being a relative minority in the world and having little social, cultural, political or economic influence.

This tendency overstated the importance of groups of these life failures such as SJWs, who seem to be losers in the dating and marriage marketplace as well as in the quest to do something useful with their lives. That in turn through a compliant media gave a boost to these views, but as their insanity emerged, the bulk of normal people fled from them, removing their power.

The upshot is that smaller blogs like this one may have greater importance in the future as people realize that wherever the herd is can be found only lies, and wherever exclusive groups gather, information of actual value is being transacted. The hierarchy of nature restores itself in the vacuum created by the failure of grandiose human designs.

The crisis over social media is reaching epic proportions: these sites, which are the new public spaces of globally connected world, are technically owned by those who paid for the servers, code, electricity, bandwidth and staff to run them; however, they are needed for the free exchange of information by people worldwide.

As of today, Twitter has suspended the account of Nick Land, a paleolibertarian philosopher who writes on topics including Neoreaction and Anarcho-Capitalism or things very much like them. Many of his posts concern seasteading, economics, the downfall of liberal democracy and the rise of tribalism.

However, the glitch is that Land is not an extremist — in fact, he is the opposite, in that he approaches questions from an analytical viewpoint from a historical and economic perspective, instead of the kind of personal or ethnic focus that many have adopted. In this way, Twitter is shooting itself in the foot by removing sensible voices and allowing the emotional to crowd the discourse.

Perhaps this is a first step toward justifying further attacks on the non-Left by removing the intellectual forces that keep non-Leftist dialogue anchored, giving the more radical fringe power, so that it can then be targeted and banned. Either way, this is a great loss for all on Twitter who value thinking about the next stage of history instead of cheerleading for the recently past one.

As the realization sets in that the functional side of humanity in the West has rejected Leftism and liberal democracy, the usual neurotics and unhappy people who make up the Left are campaigning to hide the dissent, as they always do.

Twitter is brimming with active Nazis who use your platform as a tool to recruit members, spread hate, and harass other users.

In the past several years, this problem has turned from a disturbing joke into a more disturbing reality. Racists and neonazis have consciously used issue coalitions to spread hate, recruit new members, undermine basic values of decency and honesty, and actively hound folks who would counter their message.

…It’s not subtle. When someone uses a #1488 hashtag or expresses their violent thoughts on the JQ, they’re clearly engaging in hate speech.

This is classic Leftist dogma, which takes the form of circular reasoning: “Assuming that our perspective is right, anything opposing us is wrong, and therefore is blasphemy against what we think is truth, and must be removed lest it make the gods angry.”

Dylan sang of a change so profound that the older generation would not even understand it. Now, we do understand. Dylan was announcing a worldview invasion of the West by Eastern pagan thinking. In much of our culture, that invasion has become a triumph, overturning the Western Christian view of existence. We have moved from a Twoist presupposition of a Creator God who made the structures of existence and revealed his moral will, to a Oneist presupposition that rejects any Creator or pre-existing structures and believes that humanity creates its own reality and will make a better world. This is why the Left showed utter disbelief at having lost the election; traditional politics does not even enter into its worldview.

The Eastern pagan nature of Leftism, descended perhaps from the Mongol invasions of Genghis Khan, is the idea of human individualism taking precedence over natural order and an organization to existence that extends into the metaphysical. Where the West pursued transcendentals like excellence and realism, the East pursued humanity, and as a result fell into an impassive solipsism. Now we follow them through liberal democracy and Leftism.

Those who oppose this change get called whatever nasty terms the Left can dig up. At first it was “royalists,” then “elitists,” then later “classists,” until finally with Hitler they found their Emmanuel Goldstein and started calling all of us “racists” and “Nazis.” These terms now have no meaning because they designate only that the offender has disagreed with a Leftist somewhere.

Amerika will never be popular because it offers a complex, nuanced and realist vision of human existence, but also does not reject the metaphysical. It is Nietzschean conservatism at its fullest, except that it is warm to sane interpretations of religious faith and sees them as beneficial, making it closer to Plato in the end calculus than Fred Nietzsche. It does not distill intricate political issues into slogans, emotions, or other forms of manipulation. As a result, it is difficult and unpopular.

It is only thanks to those who have made an effort to seek it out that this site thrives. It endures despite Twitter censorship including mysterious mutings, the rage of the Left, and the deliberate slighting of Amerika by those on the Right who fear it as competition because its worldview is more comprehensive than ours. It thrives only because of you, our readers.

So thank you, from the bottom of my heart and those of our other writers. It is thanks to you that we are reaching the world. Today, #184… tomorrow, the world! As we push back against the Arschpresse — that is a “Nazi-era term,” journalists — and shout ZIEGE HEIL! at the top of our lungs, remember, world: reality is dangerous, and realists are pushing back for a more interesting dangerous world than the clear path to civilization collapse that Leftism (spit) offers.

Humans destroy everything they touch. Something new is invented, and most people are afraid, so natural leaders take up its cause and make it great. Others see that this is a good thing and worth participating in, so they flock to it, but they do not alter their thinking, which fits the old way more than the new. In this way, these entryists bring the old into the new and bloat it while widening (destroying) its focus.

The old way involves what failed before, which is what humans always try because we are wired for individualism, which requires us to demand guaranteed social inclusion from any group. However, since our individualism makes us blind to the fact that other people are different from us, this includes the aggregate lot of incompetents, grifters and mental health cases that accumulate over time. Without the wisdom of Darwin to cut these people free, the human social group then submerges the new thing in the same patterns of failure that have been with us since the dawn of time.

Silicon Valley is such a case. A few engineers and managers invented the internet, but once it became commercialized, in came the fools. They wanted to do to it what they do to everything: dumb it down, remove what makes it unique, and by so doing, make it “accessible” to everyone and anyone, resulting in its genericization and thus, reduction to the same broken patterns that we see everywhere.

As a result, we are now witnessing as an oversold industry collapses from its own internal weight. The managers looked out there and saw a sea of hopeful faces belonging to those who depend on Silicon Valley for their own dreams of wealth, and so instead of contracting operations and keeping quality high, they expanded inclusiveness — becoming social heroes in the process — but adulterated quality, ensuring doom. This is what always happens with prole rule.

The updated results based on March 2009 comScore data…indicated that the number of people who click on display ads in a month has fallen from 32 percent of Internet users in July 2007 to only 16 percent in March 2009, with an even smaller core of people (representing 8 percent of the Internet user base) accounting for the vast majority (85 percent) of all clicks.

While many online media companies use click-through rate as an ad negotiation currency, the study shows that heavy clickers are not representative of the general public. In fact, heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage.

In other words, a small part of the consumer base accounts for most of the internet activity, and this group represents not healthy profit from the middle classes, but the buying habits of those who have little and will achieve little. This same type of bad measurement afflicts the entertainment industry and many consumer goods and services industries, who have calibrated their content toward the lowest common denominator without realizing the limited purchasing power of this group, and consequently find themselves in slow but steady decline.

We might even see this as a design flaw of democracy. When everyone is equal, what matter is the count of warm bodies, not who these warm bodies are. Through that metric, governments and businesses attract what is seen as a large group, but is really a small group compared to the Silent Majority, and by doing this, misses actual events in favor of symbolic events that do not represent the wider, more nuanced answer.

As these industries fade away, it makes sense to reflect on the consequences of equality which causes us to ignore the variation in our current audience. Back in the glory days of business, the buying public was a middle class comprised of relatively similar individuals. Now it is a mix of classes, races, sexes, and lifestyles/philosophies who have nothing in common, meaning that the only statistical hits we get for popularity are in these un-representative aggregates who are not the desired consumer.

Much of the dot-com censorship we see floating about now arises from the recognition by companies that their audience has shifted, and an attempt to make “safe spaces” so even more of these zombie daytime TV watchers show up, in a vain hope to produce more profit from the people who are left over once everyone else bails out.

We are already seeing this phenomenon break into the public view as both Twitter and Facebook have admitted that they mistakenly calculated more ad impressions than they delivered. The next step is for them to reveal that these ads are being seen by non-buyers.

The drama has some investors predicting more disasters. “What if Theranos is the canary in the coal mine?” says Roger McNamee, a 40-year VC veteran and managing director at Elevation Partners. “Everyone is looking at Theranos as an outlier. We may discover it’s not an outlier at all.”

Part of the problem lies in our tendency to mistake ideology for reality. We see a mental image that comports to what ideology tells us “should” be true, and then purchase accordingly, which because others follow us works for a short while. The circular Ponzi scheme allows industry to invent fake money, government to tax it heavily, and then empowers government to dump that money onto citizens through entitlements and social welfare, which they then spend on tangible goods. This keeps the economy afloat for a short while, but inevitably, a market correct begins and panic sets in as the herd searches for “the next big thing” to invest in so that we can all keep enjoying the fake value of our money.

As these different threads of the dysfunction knit together, the over-valued dot-com economy will begin its death cycle. As with earlier dot-com collapses, this will begin with a slow withdrawal by the smart money and the smarter users, then a rapidly accelerating fight over the remaining users, following by lapsing into irrelevance and being sold at low cost like MySpace.

If this hits during the first years of a Trump presidency, America will face an economic recession of massive size as the economy readjusts to cover for the fake wealth that was created by the dot-coms, especially social media. This will have rippled effects in Europe and Asia, and could result in a currency crash as it becomes clear that the economy backing those currencies was grossly over-valued and its government administrators ignored this reality.

Keeping pressure high on the cultural change wave that is carrying us into 2017 through the defeat of Leftist illusions, activists on social media are using the hashtag #StopWhiteGenocide to raise this issue against the general obliviousness and brainwashed complacency of the public. You can participate by going on social media and posting to the hashtag channel using the links below:

The best content features stories about how white people are the targets of Leftist governments, insane corporations and the angry mob of Leftist cultist zombies who want to destroy us. They want to kill us off through soft genocide. Visit our newsfeed for some ideas and help wreak havoc on the big media with a blitz of our own!